Pioneer of the Month
January 2003
Murder or Misadventure?
A balmy early evening in May 1907, a Friday. Michael Hart, age 57, the son and grandson of the two Michael Harts before him, had been seeding a field on the homestead (Lot 4 Rear Con. 7). As planned, he left shortly after 5 to walk up Edinburgh Road to the west of his farm, to see a man about a sow. He arrived in Guelph about 6 and by 7 was on Glasgow Street where he conducted his business. At a quarter to 8 he ambled down the hill on Northumberland Street and began the last night of his life.
Despite his prosperity, his cheerful and quiet nature and the respect of many of his neighbors, this third Michael Hart had the serious weakness that afflicted many a pioneer - an addiction to the ‘drink’.
At the end of Northumberland Street stood the Queen’s Hotel and there Michael stayed for an hour that night until the bartender refused him further service. Michael’s family had long accepted the burden of an alcoholic son and father and had arranged with hotels and wine merchants that "he should not receive an excessive supply of liquor". So Michael left the Queen’s and by-passed the six other hotels and two wine merchants on whom he sometimes called. Making his way east to St. Patrick’s Ward, he arrived about 9 pm on Ontario Street at the house of( bootlegger?) Bartholomew O’Connor with a bottle of whiskey and spent the next hour. At the Inquest, O’Connor said he accepted a drink of Michael’s whiskey but knew no more of it. (The jury believed him). By 10 Michael was stumbling about the nearby streets asking directions from passers-by. Apparently, he eventually decided to walk along the C.P.R. tracks. Zig-zagging as drunken men do, sometime after midnight he took a false step and fell from the 8-foot bank into the Speed River. His watch stopped at twenty to one.
Next day, May 18, the Guelph Mercury suggested darkly that Michael might have been lured down to the river by a robber and by the day after, while admitting that the authorities had found no evidence of foul play, hinted that the cries heard by a bank clerk boarding near the river on Queen Street might have meant an assault had taken place..
Despite the investigative prowess of the Mercury reporters, both Dr. Orton, the Medical Examiner, Coroner Dr.Robinson and the Inquest Jury found that "No sober man would walk from Ontario St. up the tracks to the C.P.R. station. There was not the slightest suspicion of foul play nor was there any indication of motive for suicide." The Coroner had strongly suspected that the whiskey had come from one of the hotels and had called seven different bartenders to the stand, much to the disgust of a bored juryman, but could get no satisfactory answer. If he had, the Hart estate would have had reason to prosecute.
___________The first Michael Hart was born at the end of the eighteenth century in Kaidenbourg, Bas Rhin (area in Alsace). With his wife Barbara Joseph and son Michael (born 1822), this first Hart emigrated to Puslinch about 1830 or before. He may have located on Lot 29 Front Con.7 with Johann Schmidt at some point but his own land, still held by Harts, was Lot 4 Rear 7 Con.
Either he or his son Michael and daughter-in-law Jane settled the back half of Lot 4. It was here in 1850 that their son, the Michael who died in the Speed was born and where he raised his own son Michael M. with his wife Mary Anne. Mary Anne died in 1920, leaving all her property to her "beloved son, Michael M."
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Research on the Hart Family is not yet complete but a dispute in the 1840s with a neighbor on Lot 4 about an access road to the Brock Road can be read about in the Township Papers. The new lower end of Edinburgh Road connecting to Highway #6 was actually first pushed though by one Michael Hart.
Michael's route on the fatal night
Sources: Guelph Mercury, May 18, 20, 22, 23, 1907
Chris Bowman, "German Catholic Records in Puslinch"
Puslinch Township Papers, Puslinch Historical Society